The mountain keeps eroding and the foothills keep growing. Where does this lead?
It’s time for my annual look at Milwaukee’s changing and amazing educational landscape, as shown by enrollment numbers for the several streams of publicly funded education that flow strongly in the city.
It’s been a quarter-century since the launch of private school vouchers and charter schools ended the days when saying you got a publicly funded education meant you went to schools in a centralized system.
Now, publicly funded education comes in a lot of flavors. Enrollment trends offer an important view of what is happening.
I’m going to break this into pieces. This week, the mountain, namely, the Milwaukee Public Schools system.
Next week, the molehills, namely, the development in recent years of more than half a dozen of what I would call mini-school districts in Milwaukee.
Life on the mountain offers a lot of what we could diplomatically call challenges.
A big one is that the enrollment picture for the conventional MPS system gets worse, notch by notch, year by year.
Focus on this number: 56%. That’s the percentage of Milwaukee children who get publicly funded education who were enrolled this fall in MPS (defined basically as the schools where staff members are employees of MPS).
The MPS share has gone down by a percentage point or two in pretty much every recent year. I thought it was a big deal when it fell to 67% in the mid-2000s. By two years ago, it was 59%, and last year 57%. How far away is the day when it’s half?